Ambitious Plans at Media and Entertainment Startup Brit & Co.

Brit Morin is building a media and entertainment company, Brit & Co., focused on the intersection between technology and broadly curated content in five DIY categories.

She wants to introduce new technology products to people and also help them learn ways of making things, including meals and clothing, in a series of simple steps.

She also is positioning herself to potentially be the Martha Stewart of the digital generation, an opportunity enhanced by the national television exposure she gets as tech correspondent for Katie Couric’s new show, “Katie,” and as a guest on “The Today Show.”

From her office in SoMa across from the Giants’ baseball park, Morin says she relocated to the Bay Area seven years ago after having grown up in Texas.

“Our household had two working parents,” she says, “and I never learned to do things around the house. They just didn’t have time to teach me. So I had to teach myself how to cook, French-braid my hair, and sew. I learned lots of shortcuts through trial and error.”

Now she’s sharing those shortcuts and others she discovers across the web to help busy people find easy ways to accomplish numerous tasks at home.

After working at Google on various projects, including Google TV, where she gained insight into large media and entertainment companies, she launched her site a year ago.

“As a media company today you inherently have to be a tech company too,” she explains. The traditional media are trying to adapt, while I’m trying to create a hybrid tech and media company all in-house, here in San Francisco.”

She adds, "I saw there was no one at the helm of the new generation teaching how to live a simpler yet better life. And I thought I could be that person. I can merge creativity with technology. In five years will we have NBC or a channel called Brit?”

Over the first year, she says, she has attracted an audience of over two million people. A surprise is that one-third of them are men.

“Because of so many males visiting our site, we are toning down the overly feminine nature of some of the content and offering some specific content for men in fashion and tech,” she says. “Our design has evolved to be more gender neutral.”

Brit & Co., like most consumer sites, is currently observing an extreme rapid conversion to mobile (available in iOS for now, android apps in the future) by its followers.

“Mobile users are already up to one-third of our daily traffic, and 75 percent of them come back every day.”

The company recently introduced ecommerce to its service, in the form of “Brit Kits,” popular DIY kits delivered in a box, monthly.

The company also is designing and building software applications, the first of which is Weduary, a social wedding website.

The 26-year-old founder and CEO of Brit & Co. says she has benefited from having a number of strong female mentors in the tech community, including Marissa Mayer, Tina Sharkey, and Aileen Lee.